Four Traits of the Geospatial Transformer

Editor’s note: For a real-world view of geospatial transformers at Blue Origin, Navy Federal Credit Union, and Topgolf, sign up for this WhereNext webcast.

This spring, college graduates enter the job market with burning questions no one can fully answer: What skills are most valuable in the age of AI? Will the job I want still be around in five years?

One answer is emerging from the executive suites of Fortune 500 companies: The professionals consistently in demand translate complex data into decisions that move the business.

Call them geospatial transformers. They are geographic information system (GIS) professionals who have crossed a professional threshold: fluent in the language of business, trusted by the C-suite, and proactive about applying location intelligence to business challenges before anyone thinks to ask. As organizations have come to rely on GIS technology to make sense of data across the enterprise, these professionals have grown from back-office analysts to change agents and strategic advisors.

What makes a geospatial transformer so effective in sectors from retail and manufacturing to finance and commercial real estate? Four fundamental traits define these professionals, regardless of industry:

• They excel at turning data into decisions.
• They understand business objectives and deliver business results.
• They earn trust and communicate effectively at all levels of the org chart.
• They are change agents who solve business challenges proactively.

Trait 1: Turn Data into Decisions

Business leaders view location intelligence as a competitive moat, providing unique insights into customer preferences, product performance, and market trends.

Geospatial transformers excel at extracting that insight from internal sources—sensors on delivery trucks, aerial imagery of worksites, CRM databases—and from third-party data like consumer spending reports and psychographics. They know that business metrics buried in spreadsheets are easier to see on a map or dashboard.

Corporate global security operations centers, or GSOCs, routinely use smart maps to integrate data streams and create a live picture of operations—also known as a single pane of glass.

At one Fortune 50 telecom firm, security leaders use location insight to protect employees, assets, and operations around the world. An AVP of corporate security delivered new levels of situational awareness by mapping facilities, administrative sites, network assets, retail centers, and the locations of workers in the field.

He also helped transform the GSOC’s view of events that occur off company property, such as industry conferences or recruiting fairs. “We’ve created the process and the tools to be able to quickly gather information about those events,” says the AVP. By “pushing out the perimeter” of visibility with a GIS dashboard, he helps the security team assess external risks in advance and monitor events as they unfold.

Geospatial transformers also collaborate with data scientists to break down information silos and turn vast troves of data into business insight.

By mapping and analyzing hundreds of thousands of data points, GIS professionals empowered a paper goods company to predict whether certain areas of forest contain endangered species, and helped a top consulting firm model climate risks for Fortune 500 clients.

Trait 2: Speak the Language of Business and Deliver Results

Geospatial transformers excel at turning location intelligence into business improvements.

At a top commercial real estate firm, a GIS team helped significantly increase the win rates of sales professionals by adding rich data to client presentations. But before they could do so, the executive running the GIS program had to convince sales teams of the technology’s value.

She impressed them by demonstrating how smart maps could serve as storyboards when pitching real estate strategies to clients. In one instance, the team employed GIS tools—including psychographic analysis and drive-time analytics—to help a mixed-use shopping center appeal to customer segments it had overlooked.

When the mall used that insight to change its strategy, vacancies dropped and the property was 90 percent leased within a year.

One geospatial transformer helped her restoration company increase revenue by creating the first-ever picture of its national footprint. When sales reps for the company saw every franchise on a map, they identified markets where the company wasn’t active—and signed up more than 30 new franchises.

An assistant VP said the GIS lead had transformed the company’s market awareness “from two-dimensional to four-dimensional overnight.”

Trait 3: Earn Trust at All Levels of the Org Chart

At a multibillion-dollar national retailer, geospatial transformers have become valuable advisers to executives by communicating market dynamics and business conditions on maps. Their ability to convey competitive intelligence and forecast store sales by location has made their work an essential factor in corporate decision-making.

Across industries, geospatial transformers are often change agents, translating concepts between the worlds of business and analytics. They roll out new tools and demonstrate their benefits to enterprise users.

At one of America’s largest and most popular quick-service restaurants, a GIS manager earned the trust of a small group of users, then won the C-suite’s support to scale the technology across 40 departments.

With the assertiveness of a geospatial transformer, he created tools that real estate VPs could use to predict market value and justify capital spending—important factors when every new restaurant is a multimillion-dollar investment.

The GIS manager studied what was important to his business colleagues, then created applications that allowed them to drop a pin on a map and forecast a potential store’s sales, see the trade area’s demographic profile, and understand its impact on neighboring stores.

These tools were built on a shared language of business goals. “Whether we make that [investment] decision more quickly or we forecast more accurately to know what our overall return on investment, or ROI, is, it’s a very easy value proposition for us,” the enterprise GIS manager says.

Trait 4: Solve Business Problems Proactively

Geospatial transformers don’t wait for support tickets to come in. They market their services, showing colleagues how GIS capabilities can address pain points.

At one of the country’s largest utilities, a geospatial transformer took the stage at a company-wide meeting to issue a call for collaboration. She marketed GIS as a single source of truth across business units and offered to partner with colleagues to tackle challenges.

Leaders of the security program took her up on the offer. The outcome was a solution that met their goals: a portal that integrates crime data, incident reports, and social media data to improve the awareness and responsiveness of corporate security.

A research director for a global media company seized an opportunity to help sales colleagues identify new prospects.

Unprompted, she created a GIS-powered tool showing new businesses registered in a salesperson’s territory. With that information, account managers could tailor advertising packages to business owners looking to grow in the area. The research director anticipated the business need, sensed how GIS could help, and created a solution colleagues could use to fuel company growth—before anyone asked for it.

Geospatial transformers make themselves indispensable by mastering the context their tools operate in—the business challenges, the decision-makers, the moments when location intelligence changes the outcome. In an era of economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, this may be the most durable skill set of all.